Best Sex Writing 2010 (11 page)

Over the next few days, the old negative response to the label
S/M
kept circling my thoughts. Once again, I reminded myself that when I was called a pornographer, a masturbator, a lesbian, or a prostitute, my advice to myself was consistent: “Embrace the label to destroy its power over you.” As I walked toward this last label, I was desperately trying to shake the feeling that there was something intrinsically wrong with S/M. Pain was the opposite of pleasure!

The following week Suzanne called at the last minute saying she had to cancel, which gave me the perfect excuse not to go. But I was drawn to the possibility that I might discover a new dimension of sex. This was the last sexstyle I had yet to check out. In spite of the bitter cold weather, I bundled up and started walking down Fifth Avenue toward Greenwich Village. Entering the small apartment, I looked around the room and didn’t see one familiar face. My internal dialogue was a broken record:
These women are probably all lesbian separatists and the minute they find out I’m bisexual, they won’t let me join.
I’d been discriminated against so many times in the past that the chip on my shoulder weighed heavily.

In spite of my anticipated rejection, I visually fell into lust with every woman there. One couple caught my eye first. A woman with dark hair was wearing a policeman’s cap and holding a chain attached to a collar worn by her beautiful prisoner. Outrageously incorrect! Another woman wearing a nurse’s uniform had me fantasizing elaborate group enema scenes. Several women were androgynous butch dykes, and one literally took my breath away because I was convinced she was a man at first sight. There were also several pretty lipstick lesbians. The variety of women in the room offered something to please every sexual taste.

As we went around the room, each woman introduced herself and stated whether she was dominant or submissive and said a few words about how she liked to play. The closer they got to me the faster the butterflies fluttered inside my stomach. When it was my turn I defensively announced, “I’m a bisexual lesbian who’s into self-inflicted pleasure.” Then I braced myself for the rejection. Instead, several women smiled. One asked how I inflicted my pleasure. When I said it was with an electric vibrator, the room broke up laughing. Several women said they too were bisexual. One lovely redhead said she was married to a man, but had a woman slave she loved.

After the meeting ended and we sat around talking, I discovered the woman in the nurse’s uniform really was a nurse and the woman wearing the policeman’s hat worked for the board of education. Some of the other women were writers, one was an advertising executive, and another an investment broker. All and all, it was a group of professional women with a variety of jobs who lived in the New York metropolitan area. A coalition of lesbian and bisexual feminists who loved kinky sex was one of my fondest dreams come true. Within no time, I was right at home.

After several meetings, I began to understand the concept
that all forms of sex were an exchange of power, whether it was conscious or unconscious. My focus had been exclusively on the exchange of pleasure in sex. I had never considered sex in terms of power. A basic principle of S/M is that all sexual activities between one or more adults must be consensual, which required a verbal negotiation followed by an agreement between the players. In my youth, when I had sex with a man, I automatically assumed he was in control. All my years of romantic sex when we tried to read each other’s minds was nonconsensual sex with me as a bottom. By the time I was forty and into sport fucking, I learned to take control as a form of self-protection, but none of this was ever discussed or agreed upon. When I had sex with a woman, I relied on visual cues. As a teacher, I simply asked her questions.

The idea that sex was an exchange of power presented a new understanding of my role as a workshop leader. I’d often kidded around in the groups about being a “top sergeant,” but I never thought of myself as a dominant. Instead, I was guiding the group through pleasure rituals. Once I stepped back and looked at the power dynamics, I was blown away with a new image of my work. Every month I got a dozen women I’d never met to agree to spend two afternoons with me in the nude, share details of their sex lives and show me and each other their pussies. On the second day, we’d masturbate in a circle, have orgasms with electric machines and end with group massage. Since I got paid, that made me one of the biggest professional Doms in town.

Until I joined my S/M support group, I had been unable to see this power dynamic. No wonder society condemned this sexual subculture. Society allowed us to avoid looking at how unaware we are of our sexual power and therefore we continued to abuse it. This ignorance sustained the illusion that men and women were created equal. Yet everywhere I looked, I witnessed
inequality. A corporate executive climbed into a limousine next to a trash can where a bag lady rummaged for food. A belief in equal opportunity and that government is “by and for the people” was the same as believing in the myth of romantic love with its false promise of living happily ever after. As I looked at sex from this new perspective, it felt like I was waking from a deep sleep.

Gradually, I began to understand the immense variety of activities these women enjoyed: bondage, spanking, verbal humiliation, butch/femme roles, cross-dressing, fetishes, recreational sex, piercing, tattoos, and public sex performances. Everyone assumed a role that represented her position of power as a dominant or submissive without any judgments that one was better than the other. Women who played both roles were “switchables.” Except for tattoos, bondage and spanking, I’d done most of these activities. I told the group that bondage scenes had been part of my sexual fantasies for years, but I’d never actually experienced them. They said new members didn’t have to be experienced players. The purpose of the group was to explore all the possibilities of fantasy role-playing with other like-minded women.

One night Doris, one of the founding mothers of the group, gave me some porn she’d written about consensual humiliation. Although I enjoyed reading it, I couldn’t imagine how humiliation could ever turn me on. She suggested I think about something I’d done in sex that I didn’t want to do, something that embarrassed me as well as excited me, something that made me feel as though I were out of control, dirty, or extremely guilty. Scanning memories, I couldn’t get any recall on sexual humiliation. After all, I’d just spent the last fifteen years proving to myself, and anyone else who would listen, that sex was good clean fun.

As I continued to think about what Doris had said, a peculiar uncomfortable feeling crept over me. Had becoming a feminist
sex teacher taken the spice out of my sex life? Had I lifted sex out of the gutter and elevated it to transcendental heights of cosmic bliss? Had I lost touch with basic aspects of my own human nature? Maybe in the efforts to redeem masturbation, I’d brainwashed myself with spiritual hearts and flowers, and in the process, I’d forgotten my humble beginnings when sex was definitely dirty and hot.

My erotic pendulum had swung over into the white light and stayed there. During the midseventies when I was dedicating my orgasms to the goddess of sexual love and abundance with meditative sex rituals, I’d forgotten about my dark side, a subterranean place where my mind sniffed out dirty little perversions. My masturbation fantasies had bondage scenes where I was helpless and fucked by wild dogs or Boy Scout troops. Now that I was no longer smoking marijuana and communing with spirit guides, a little “smut” might do me some good. So I continued to ask: “What was the most humiliating, sexy thing I’ve ever done?”

Finally, my mind darted back to the beginning of my love affair with Grant. Seven years of sexual starvation during marriage had me as horny as a nanny goat, and I’d fallen into romantic love again. Ignoring his moodiness, heavy depressions, and bursts of volatile anger, I was utterly dependent upon him for my best orgasms, which kept me coming back in spite of his bad temper.

One Saturday night, Grant wanted to cancel our date, saying he wasn’t fit for company and preferred to be alone. Pushing my agenda, I said I’d come over and cheer him up. He declined and I insisted, confident that my sexual allure would banish his black mood. A big part of my arousal was anticipating sex while I got dressed. After I put in my diaphragm and showered, I slipped into a black knit dress that clung to every inch of my firm body. Carefully, I applied mascara, eyeliner, and lipstick. The weather was
still warm, so I put on high-heeled sandals without hose. “Sexy!” I thought, as I looked in the mirror.

When I arrived at Grant’s apartment around four in the afternoon, he was still in his pajamas nursing a depression. He let me in, and then went back into the bedroom and flopped down on his bed lethargically. Even though I could see he was miserable, I slipped off my panties with seduction in mind. Standing next to his bed, I began undulating my hips inches from his face while I slowly raised my skirt. He watched without showing any signs of interest. Heat from embarrassment flushed my cheeks, yet I moved closer and began massaging my clit, trying to arouse my disinterested lover.

At the time, the idea that he was my master and I was his sexual slave was not in my conscious mind. I simply wanted to have sex. But in recalling that moment, I could see how my feelings of humiliation coupled with sexual arousal had produced an emotional state, a kind of desperation, and I couldn’t stop. That’s when I spotted an empty coke bottle on his end table and grabbed it. As I thrust my hips forward, I slowly pushed the bottle inside my vagina. No decent woman would have done what I was doing. I definitely felt “dirty,” but fucking myself finally got his attention. He stood up, pulled me to the floor and pushed me over the edge of his low bed. Still in his pajamas, he knelt behind me, opened the fly and shoved his hard cock into my wet cunt. Exactly what I wanted! While fucking me, he hurled his sadistic lightning bolt. “The next time you want to look sexy, I suggest you wear hose to hide the dirt on the soles of your feet.”

It was a moment of utter humiliation that totally shattered my feminine desirability—I was dirty, unattractive. Lust was now combined with degradation, and those two conflicting emotions made my orgasm so intense that I cried and trembled all over like
an autumn leaf. After getting what I wanted, the lingering feeling of shame was so confusing that I simply buried the memory and the scene was forgotten. We’d been faithful to the traditional sex roles of dominant sadistic male and submissive masochistic female with not one ounce of awareness. I was simply “in love.”

I thought about the first summer with Tommy in my early twenties when we had a vicious argument and I’d questioned his manhood. He’d gotten so angry that he slapped me across the face. Afterward I cried while he kissed away my tears, telling me how sorry he was and how much he loved me. All of this drama was foreplay for the hot sex that followed. Very interesting! And what about the time when Dr. Juan pierced my ears, which hurt like hell, just so I wouldn’t lose the gold hoops he’d brought me from Madrid? So I wasn’t such an S/M novice after all.

Interesting how as romantic lovers we never thought we were playing a role. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that our society was doing around-the-clock S/M without any awareness. Lovers possessed one another, husbands dominated wives, some wives dominated husbands, mothers punished their children, the kids teased the dog, and the dog got to bite the postman. Everyone had someone to “love.”

After several more meetings, I realized some women in the group felt that being in a role full-time bordered on an obsession. Others who were doing master and slave full-time felt the most passionate sex would always be based upon owning another person. Their style of S/M was the ultimate metaphor for romantic love. If both lovers consciously agreed, being consumed by an erotic obsession was viewed as a sexual preference.

Although I’d burned out on romantic obsessions, I’d be the first to admit they had produced some of the hottest sex I’d ever known. Like it or not, my postmenopausal sex life had become
warm and friendly, maybe even downright wholesome. The only obsessive passion in my life was the current creative project I had embraced: writing a sexual memoir. Little did I know then that the cruelest mistress of all had me totally enslaved! I feverishly wrote night after night for five years, devoted to telling my sexual story that would be rejected by every publisher who read it. There were so many rejections I lost count. I was told if I turned it into a novel, they could sell a million copies. How’s that for utter humiliation?

My manuscript went back into the closet until I shopped it in 2005. Once again, my sex life was rejected. This time I realized that the publishing industry doesn’t deserve me. I’m back to the one place that has never censored me—the Internet.

 

 

A 2005 commercial for Kimono condoms speaks volumes about the company’s self-image. In the ad, a woman sits at a poker table with four men. The setup is swank: chandelier light reflects from the walls, glass tumblers litter the table, smooth jazz plays in the background. When the woman runs out of dough, she wagers a single Kimono condom, and another player sees her bet with all his remaining chips. It’s a fitting analogy for a company that presents itself both as an underdog, and a producer of high-end condoms. Consider the tagline: “Kimono. When the Stakes Are High.”

In a market dominated by Trojan and Durex, where images of male virility are the norm, Berkeley-based Kimono has created a brand identity that’s an anathema to the competition. Launched twenty-one years ago by Mayer Laboratories, a company founded by longtime birth-control advocate David Mayer, Kimono is the condom industry’s answer to couture. It’s a sleek, elegant Japanese
import with a pretty patina—packages are designed with cranes, koi and other Japanese imagery—and a price about 15 to 20 percent higher than most other brands.